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Tag: debt ceiling

It’s been going around for years, at least in some version, and it starts something like, “Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list…”, and then there is the text of a purported, proposed Constitutional Amendment asking for Congressional reform.

This email goes around and then gets forwarded by lots of people on Facebook just about every time our wonderful members of Congress seem to get their panties all in a bunch and can’t seem to agree, or get along, or get work done. There is a lot of finger-pointing, a bunch of name-calling, and along with that a lot of people complaining about congress, wanting something done, and then forgetting the mess come election time. This time it’s going around thanks to the government shutdown, the closing of memorials so even Veterans can’t visit, and the impending “hitting the debt ceiling” which seems to come around every year lately.

The thing is people seem to have a short memory as this email, according to Snopes, has been circulating in one form or another since 2009, and then enhanced when yes, Warren Buffet did do an interview on CNBC commenting about how members of Congress should be ineligible for re-election when there is a deficit problem. The thing is, since the Buffet quote about the 3% deficit problem is technically true, Snopes lists the quote as “True”, but I’m going to guess most people fail to read the rest of the Snopes analysis detailing the falseness with the rest of the email, and the supplemental link to the deconstructing of the proposed amendment and most importantly, whether or not Warren Buffet asked people to share the email.

I used to tell people when they forward things that they are fake, or partially fake in this case, but most of the times they just seem mad that I corrected them, sometimes write back something like “Well, he should have said this.”, or just don’t care, so I’ve pretty much tried to stop the urge to tell people to stop forwarding things that aren’t true. I was going to plight more along the lines of “Do you care if you send emails that aren’t true?”, but I’ve found most people don’t care, so instead I’m going with “Do you think Warren Buffet would start a chain letter?”